IAM Reference Architecture

In our research reports, events, and consulting engagements, TechVision has relentlessly described the need for organizations to transform into Digital Enterprises. Being a Digital Enterprise emphasizes the requirement to be adaptive to the marketplace with enterprise-wide agility that optimizes responses to events, and opportunities. Business buyers and consumers are becoming adept at finding exactly what they want, and enterprises have to become equally adept in finding, and aligning the people, knowledge and operating assets to match.

This granular, orchestrated approach to enterprise IT resources risks its carefully constructed risk management and IT governance capabilities and as we first described in our report “Identity is the New Perimeter”, shifts the focus of protection from the data center perimeter to the individual resources themselves – no matter where they are located. This new reality is driving new requirements for identity and access management.

This report lays out the case for evolving your IAM environment into an Identity Fabric capable of supporting the requirements of a digital enterprise. It also suggests building or obtaining capabilities to support emerging requirements putting pressure on enterprise IAM which is becoming the nexus of customer experience and risk management.

We suggest you begin the journey by adopting a Reference Architecture to

• Organize business requirements
• Tie the requirements to capabilities
• Identify strengths and gaps
• Measure progress

We have developed the IAM Reference Architecture templates we describe in the details of this report over many client engagements and they represent our best thinking on all of the capabilities that might be necessary and provides a checklist with which to gauge your progress.